August 2016

Are you getting the most out of your eCommerce website? How is it doing regarding performance? If you don’t know the answer to this, most likely, you haven’t measured its performance. This has been discussed in general during the previous article, but we will focus on e-Commerce websites.

As earlier discussed, your site’s Key Performance Indicators or KPIs has a significant reliance on your website goals. In this case, an eCommerce website. Below are some important KPIs to measure:

eCommerce Conversion Rate

Cart Abandonment Rate

Average Order Value

Products Per Order

If you have an existing eCommerce website, cart abandonment rate should be one of the first metrics to focus on and improve. It’s important to analyse what made these visitors decide not to go through with the checkout process.

Here are some examples of tracking tools best suited for eCommerce websites:

The tools stated above aren’t the only possible tools best suited for eCommerce tracking, but for this article, we will highlight MixPanel as the tool of choice.

Why MixPanel?

MixPanel’s user interface and design are user-friendly and very easy to use without the need for much tuning and settings. MixPanel also lets you view data, updated in real-time, which has advanced features you can use to filter for certain events.

Pricing for MixPanel depends on the number of data points you need. Data points are counted everytime an event is tracked with MixPanel. They are described as tracking credits. A free account is credited with 25,000 data points, to begin with. Paid plans start from $150/month for 500,000 data points, $350/month for 2,000,000 data points, $600/month for 4,000,000 data points, $1000/month for 8,000,000 data points and $2000/month for 20,000,000 data points.

Feel free to connect with us if you wish to learn more about your eCommerce website performance, opportunities to improve its performance and what tools are a perfect fit for your business.

Social Media has always been a valuable tool for reaching out and building relationships with our market. Not only that, but it has also proven itself to be a significant element in boosting sales and increasing ROI.

To make sure that our social media marketing efforts produce the best results for us, it is important that we keep track of the right social media metrics or KPI beyond just likes, follows and shares. Below are some of the metrics we monitor:

Shares

Likes

Follows

Profile Visits

Clicks

Mentions

Engagement

Impressions

There are various social media monitoring tools each with their distinct features that let you track one or more social media KPI from one or more platform.

Note that are various free and paid tools that enable you to monitor your social media other than those referred to above. In this article, we’ll focus on mentions as a social media KPI and highlight Mention as the tool of choice.

Why Mention?

In a nutshell, Mention can act as a sieve by filtering mentions and signals to make sure you receive only those relevant to you and filter out the noise. Need a report? No problem! You can export stats into CSV or PDF files to share with your team!

Need on-the-go monitoring? Mention has a mobile app which you can use to engage with your audience where you are.

Mention can be integrated across various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest, among others. With this set-up, you can engage and interact from mentions by just using your Mention dashboard. No need to switch in between tabs to access your various accounts.

Prices for Mention start from $29/month for individual users to $99/month for small businesses, and you can sign up for a free trial to get a feel of the product before subscribing for a full plan.

Feel free to connect with us if you wish to know more about Social Media Monitoring and the tools that fit your business.

How’s your website doing? If you have no idea, then you probably haven’t been measuring your web performance. If you don’t measure your web performance then you can’t possibly put a value on your website nor can you determine how to improve your site’s performance.

Your Website Key Performance Indicators or KPIs pertains to a set of measurement of performance regarding your website goals. To define your KPI, you have to set specific goals depending on the type of your website.

Most common types of KPIs include, but are not limited to:

Website Traffic

Conversion Rate

Bounce Rate

Lead Generation

Let’s focus on website traffic for now.

Website traffic, in general terms, refers to the number of people visiting your website. This could be further broken down into paid traffic, organic traffic, direct traffic, and referral traffic.

Various free and paid tools enables you to track your website traffic aside from those mentioned above. Today we will highlight KISSMetrics as the tool of choice.

Why KISSMetrics?

KISSMetrics hosts a robust set of features that lets you track beyond just page views. Not only that, but the setup process is considerably easier than most tools as it does not require you to write code. KISSMetrics makes a great alternative to Google Analytics.

With KISSMetrics, you can track visitors and monitor their activities even before converting enabling users to gain insights of consumer behaviour before purchasing. With this knowledge, you can improve your funnel according to consumer behaviour to increase conversions.

As powerful a tool KISSMetrics may be, it does not come cheap. The Startup package starts at $120/month, the Growth package at $400/month and the Power package at $600/month. But, worry not! You can get a feel of this tool by requesting a demo account before deciding to shell out cash for the full version.

Feel free to connect with us if you wish to learn more about website performance metrics and how to leverage them to improve your website performance.

There are various A/B Testing tools available if you search around, most of which are paid software. But since not everyone is ready to shell out money just to test them out, we’ll highlight one of the known free tools around which is Google Analytics Content Experiments.

What are Content Experiments?

Content Experiments uses a somewhat different approach than standard A/B and multivariate testing. Content Experiments uses an A/B/N model. You’re not testing just two versions of a page as in A/B testing, and you’re not testing various combinations of components on a single page as in multivariate testing. Instead, you are testing up to 10 full versions of a single page, each delivered to users from a separate URL.

While it’s mentioned that you can test up to 10 full variations, we would still recommend to keep it around 2-3 only.

Before we lay out the steps to setting up an A/B Test experiment, be sure that you have you have properly set up your Google Analytics account and that you have your goals defined. Need help? Feel free to connect with us!

Making blind changes to your website can potentially deliver a negative impact to your business. What you think is a good idea may do more damage than good which is why A/B Testing is always the right thing to do before going live with updates and changes.

Nowadays, almost anyone can perform A/B Testing made accessible by user-friendly tools in the market. But just because it’s easy to do does not mean that setting up is all it takes.

Today, we’ll be discussing some of the top A/B Testing mistakes you should avoid.

1. Testing Without a Hypothesis

A/B Testing should not start with just setting up the actual test without establishing a hypothesis. It should be based on real data and careful analysis and not some random idea.

2. Ending a Test Too Early

Ending your test before it reaches statistical significance is another common mistake in A/B Testing. Statistical significance is when one version proves to be significantly better than the other. And no, a test does not just happen in a day. Experts advice to conduct it within a 7-day period with a 95% difference.

3. Implementing Someone Else’s Results

Blindly copying and implementing someone else’s results does not automatically mean that you will get the same results. What worked for them may not exactly work for you. Whether or not a change will work for you is something you will never know if you do not run the test yourself.

4. Testing with Too Many Variables

While it’s possible to do this, you may have trouble determining which of the variables are improving or decreasing conversions.

5. Running Too Many Tests

Once you get a hang of A/B Testing, you might find yourself enjoying the process. But beware of running too many tests once you see a lot of opportunities for improvement thinking it will save you time. This can potentially affect results.

Connect with us if you’re looking to learn more about A/B Testing and would like to know how it can help your business.